Free College Level Education

Years ago if you wanted to know how to program a computer or do just about anything on one you needed to obtain an advanced degree in math, electronics, engineering and what have you.  That ran you into tens of thousands of dollars.

As an example, you want to learn a programming language, say JAVA.  JAVA seems to be the language of preference in most computer science classes.  You could attend a formal class at a college to learn the basics of JAVA but that can cost you from $1,000 to $3,000 or more.  OK, if you are going for a degree you will have no choice but go that route.

But let’s say you are not degree bound or just want to learn JAVA or are in a degree program and need extra help.  There are plenty of free tutorials on the internet that do a great job of teaching JAVA.  Even Oracle, the owner of JAVA (formally Sun Computers owned it until they were bought by Oracle) has free tutorials on JAVA.  You can borrow books from your library as well.  Plus on YouTube you can find tutorials on it as well with other sites.  As an example The New Boston,  http://www.thenewboston.org, has loads of free tutorials on various subjects including JAVA.   With some work on your part you will know the language for free.

JAVA is not the only computer language you can learn for free.  COBOL, ASSEMBLER, FORTRAN, C+, and many other languages can be learned at no cost that way.

Some universities are offering free college level courses as well on the internet.  M.I.T. and Berkley are two just universities doing this.  You can get some great college level education for free.  But not every course the university gives is offered for free and sometimes the course is pretty skimpy, that is they simply did not do good job preparing it and leave you hanging. Plus the courses might be a few years dated as to what the current curriculum is, but the knowledge is sound. Unfortunately you will not get any credit for taking those what so ever plus you might not be able to interact with the professors. In any case you can take college level courses for free.

Computer programming is not the only thing you can learn for free, CISCO, HTML, CSS, Photoshop, FileMaker Pro, MS Office and many other subjects can be learned for free.  You just need to search them out.

Let’s look at CISCO.  Like JAVA there are plenty of sources on the internet where you can get free tutorials.  To practice CISCO you could go to eBay and buy some routers and switches which can cost from a few hundred to over a thousand or with a little digging you can get CISCO’s PacketTracer which simulates the hardware only it is free.  Since it is a computer simulator and draws no power, your wallet will love the fact there is no increase in your electric bill nor is there any additional hardware to buy.

In some areas you will need to buy the software to use to learn on but that is the fraction of the cost for a college degree.  A lot of times you can get software to learn on fairly inexpensively on eBay.  Granted a lot of it is not the latest but there is nothing wrong with it to learn on while saving money.

As an example you want to learn Visual Basic then you need Visual Studio to learn on. I have seen Visual Studio for sale on PC Mall for over $4,000. At the same time go to eBay and I’ve seen it for under $100.

By the way, if programming is what you seek then you will find that most compilers are available for free.

Let me get you started with some links to some free education:

• 800 Free Online Courses From Top Universities -http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses
• MIT Open Courseware - http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
• Learning the Java Language by Oracle - http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/TOC.html
• The New Boston – Bucky Roberts had produced numerous computer related courses plus a few others as well – http://thenewboston.org
• Alison – they have several courses ranging from computers to Risk Management to Math and much more - https://alison.com/
• COBOL programming - http://www.csis.ul.ie/cobol/course/Default.htm
• Harvard Online courses – these are the free ones, they do have online courses for credit but they will charge you for those - http://online-learning.harvard.edu/courses?sort_by=date_added&cost[]=free
• University of California Berkeley on iTunes has some free courses
• University of Irvine has a few courses - http://ocw.uci.edu/
• UMass Boston has a nice selection - http://ocw.umb.edu/index.html
• Carnegie Mellon University also has a nice selection - http://oli.cmu.edu/learn-with-oli/see-our-free-open-courses/
• CodeAcademy is another great resource if you want to learn programming - https://www.codecademy.com/

There is another resource that I found while not free is very cost effective, Lynda.com. Here are some great tutorials available at a very low price. All you need to do is sign up for monthly access and you can access all of the tutorials that they have for the one price. Some public libraries may grant you free access to that site just by being a patron so you can take an unlimited amount of courses from Lynda.com for free. So it pays to check with your local library.

So with a little effort on your part you can find some great sources for free or nearly free such as computer education as well as other subjects and become more valuable in this highly competitive job market.